National Cooperative Bank

National Cooperative Bank needed an easy solution to scale up generating loan amortization schedules without totally changing their models – XLeratorDB was the answer

National Cooperative Bank (NCB, https://www.ncb.coop) is a unique bank that addresses the financial needs of cooperatives and socially responsible organizations nationwide especially in low-income communities. To better facilitate the loan pricing analysis, NCB needed a way to do a loan-by-loan analysis of their loan portfolio, which at the end of 2015 was $1.6B. This process would have been impossible to achieve using spreadsheets. They needed to take the models that they had built in Excel and convert them to run in SQL Server helping them to satisfy their reporting requirements and eliminating the spreadsheet risk.

As Tao Yang, Data Analytics Manager, VP for NCB described it: his group was comfortable with the loan schedule generation process using the financial functions in Excel, but they needed a way to support huge increases in data volume (including many years of historical cash flow data) that Excel couldn’t manage. NCB already had powerful Microsoft SQL Server database servers and Tao wanted a way to use those with the familiar financial functions like XIRR, PMT and IPMT.

Tao did some quick online searches and found XLeratorDB from Westclintech. XLeratorDB provides in-database analytics for SQL Server and includes all the familiar financial functions from Excel that Tao and his team are comfortable with. Tao asked NCB’s IT team for help and they downloaded, installed, and did some quick tests. Because the XLeratorDB functions work just like the equivalent Excel functions Tao’s group was able to get started right away. Tao’s group then did more in-depth testing of their existing models to confirm the results from Excel matched those generated in SQL Server using the XLeratorDB financial functions: the results matched perfectly!

Once NCB had confirmed the testing results, they quickly modified their process to use SQL Server instead of Excel. They also realized that in moving out of the spreadsheet environment that there was an opportunity to improve some of the processes so he approached the Westclintech team about making the necessary changes. Tao was impressed about how professionally Westclintech managed the changes which they delivered in less than a month.

With the final changes in place, NCB was ready to start using XLeratorDB in production soon after. Tao said that since XLeratorDB has all the familiar Excel financial functions natively in SQL Server it was a very easy transition: “XLeratorDB was easy to adopt.” Additionally, NCB was very happy with XLeratorDB since it was reasonably priced for the functions it provided. As Tao said, “it was a very reasonable solution.”

Faced with the challenges of scaling up their business to meet changing regulatory and business requirements, NCB was very happy with the XLeratorDB solution. NCB got the best of both worlds: they could continue to use the financial functions and models they were comfortable with and they could harness the power of SQL Server to crunch large volumes of data quickly. XLeratorDB and the team at Westclintech provided an easy to implement and reasonably priced solution. This enabled the NCB business to help its client cooperatives and the communities they serve.